Janet Rich Edwards’s debut novel Canticle transports readers to thirteenth-century Bruges, where mysticism collides with institutional power in a luminous meditation on faith, female autonomy, and the dangerous act of seeking God without permission. This is historical fiction that breathes with quiet urgency, exploring a world where scripture in one’s mother tongue could cost a life, and where women carved out spaces of spiritual freedom in the cracks between church and marketplace.
A World Between Stone and Water
Edwards reconstructs medieval Flanders with remarkable tactile detail, never allowing historical accuracy to suffocate her prose. The Bruges she conjures exists in sensory particulars: the acrid smell of bonfires, sheets snapping on begijnhof clotheslines like wings of gulls, amber window panes casting golden light across manuscript pages. The city’s canals become both literal and metaphorical conduits, channels through which commerce flows alongside whispered scripture and forbidden spiritual longings.
The begijnhof—that enclosed community of independent religious women—emerges as the novel’s beating heart. Edwards renders this space with exquisite attention, presenting the beguines neither as radical proto-feminists nor as meek handmaidens, but as pragmatic women navigating impossible constraints. They card wool and nurse the sick, translate scripture in secret and negotiate with guild masters, creating lives of meaningful work and spiritual depth outside both marriage and convent walls. It’s a portrait that feels historically grounded yet startlingly relevant, depicting women who refuse to choose between devotion and agency.
The Soul’s Geography
Aleys van Bruyk arrives on the page fully formed: stubborn, intellectually hungry, prone to visions she cannot control. At sixteen, after her childhood friend Finn abandons her for the monastery, she flees an arranged marriage and stumbles toward the vita apostolica—the apostolic life of poverty and service. What follows is not a straightforward spiritual journey but a circuitous exploration of what it means to encounter the divine when you’re uncertain whether the voice you hear belongs to God, the devil, or your own desperate imagination.
Edwards excels at rendering Aleys’s mystical experiences without lapsing into New Age platitudes or medieval cliché. When Aleys tastes the illuminated pages of her psalter, experiencing pomegranate and lapis as actual sensory phenomena, we believe both in the visions and in Aleys’s bewilderment at them. The novel treats faith as genuinely mysterious—neither dismissing mystical experience as delusion nor presenting it as unambiguous divine mandate. Aleys wants certainty; God offers only fragments, glimpses, the maddening ambiguity of dust motes dancing in shafts of light.
The supporting cast deepens this exploration. Marte, Aleys’s servant-turned-companion, provides grounded counterpoint to mystical excess, questioning biblical narratives with sharp pragmatism. Sophia Vermeulen, the begijnhof’s magistra, embodies quiet wisdom, teaching Aleys that simplicity—not spiritual pyrotechnics—might be the truest path. Even Friar Lukas, whose earnest faith curdles into something more troubling, reveals how easily devotion can become possession.
The Architecture of Ambition
Where Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards stumbles slightly is in its political machinations. Bishop Jan Smet’s schemes feel occasionally mechanical, his motivations shifting to serve plot requirements rather than emerging from consistent characterization. The novel sometimes treats institutional corruption as given rather than earned, relying on readers’ assumptions about medieval church politics rather than fully dramatizing them. The appearance of papal delegates and the machinery of heresy trials, while historically grounded, occasionally overwhelm the more intimate spiritual questions at the novel’s core.
The pacing, too, wobbles in the middle section. Edwards’s commitment to Aleys’s spiritual confusion means we spend extended passages in the anchorhold—that cell where Aleys volunteers for lifelong enclosure—watching her doubt, pray, and doubt again. This mirrors the actual experience of spiritual uncertainty, but narrative momentum sometimes dissipates into repetitive cycles of vision and abandonment. Readers seeking constant forward movement may find these sections testing, though they’re essential to Edwards’s larger project of depicting faith as process rather than achievement.
A Language of Longing
Edwards’s greatest achievement lies in her prose, which shifts registers with remarkable fluidity. She writes the sensual passages of the Song of Songs—the Canticle that gives the novel its title—with aching beauty, capturing both the text’s erotic charge and its spiritual resonance. The forbidden Dutch translations that circulate through the begijnhof pulse with similar dual energies, suggesting how vernacular scripture might simultaneously liberate and endanger.
The novel’s treatment of language itself becomes thematic: Who owns the word of God? Can translation be heresy when it makes the sacred accessible? Edwards never preaches answers, but the questions resonate. When Marte begins writing her own interpretations—reimagining Eve’s transgression as obedient co-creation with God—Canticle suggests that ordinary women’s spiritual insights might be as valid as any church doctrine, a radical claim wrapped in medieval trappings.
The Fire That Transforms
Edwards refuses easy resolutions. The novel’s conclusion, which I’ll not spoil, offers neither simple martyrdom nor comfortable escape. Instead, Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards suggests that the act of bearing witness—speaking what one has seen and felt, regardless of consequence—constitutes its own kind of salvation. Aleys’s journey from desperate certainty to uncertain faith paradoxically strengthens rather than weakens her conviction. She learns that doubt and devotion can coexist, that loving God doesn’t require pretending to understand Him.
The book’s treatment of female community particularly resonates. The beguines’ reading circle, where women stumble through Dutch scripture together, becomes a space of mutual formation. They don’t transcend their flaws—Katrijn remains prickly, Cecilia stays imperfect—but they create something larger than individual virtue. Edwards understands that women’s spiritual lives have often flourished in these interstitial spaces, neither fully inside nor completely outside institutional structures.
For Readers Seeking
Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards will appeal to readers who loved:
- The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe – For another medieval woman’s mystical experiences and struggles with religious authority
- Matrix by Lauren Groff – For powerful depictions of female religious communities and women creating autonomous spaces
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – For historically grounded fiction that makes medieval politics intimate and urgent
- The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader – For another exploration of anchoritic life and medieval women’s spirituality
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – For meditative prose that takes religious experience seriously without sentimentality
This is a debut that announces a significant talent, a novelist unafraid to wrestle with questions of faith in an age often uncomfortable with such wrestling. Edwards writes with the confidence of someone who has genuinely reckoned with her subject matter, producing a novel that feels both thoroughly researched and deeply felt. Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards reminds us that the past was peopled by individuals as complex and seeking as ourselves, that questions of meaning and transcendence have always been urgent, and that sometimes the most radical act is simply insisting on one’s own encounter with the divine.
It’s a book that glows with quiet intensity, much like the illuminated manuscripts that appear throughout its pages—beautiful, intricate, and designed to last.